Evaluating e-Justice. The Design of an Assessment Framework for e-Justice Systems and its application to the Italian Trial Online

The topic of measuring the performance of e-justice systems is scarcely considered by the literature. The few studies that deal with e-justice performance focus only on efficiency-oriented variables. That approach may be appropriate for Information Systems (IS) evaluation, but it is too simplistic for e-justice. E-justice system deployment also has a considerable effect on the broad spectrum of values guiding the administration of justice. Indeed, justice systems in democratic societies provide a set of services, but, above all, support a set of values that refer, in general to the rule of law, such as judges' independence and impartiality, equality of access, fair trial, and procedural transparency. Since e-justice systems also are supposed to pursue these values, they have to be taken into account in any assessment exercise. In this project, we proposed a new evaluative framework that integrates the efficiency-oriented variables derived from the IS literature with variables that measure the capacity of an e-justice system to support justice system values. In order to design an integrated e-justice system assessment framework, we first focused on the literature on the evaluation of IS, and in particular, on one of the most widely used frameworks for the evaluation of IS: the DeLone and McLean model. In particular, we utilized the DeLone and McLean model and we adapted its variables to the e-justice sector. Successively, through the analysis of the justice systems evaluation literature, we integrated the DeLone and McLean model with variables that focus on justice system values. The framework has been operationalized through a mixed methodology: quantitative analysis (users' survey and secondary source data) and qualitative (in particular through semi-structured interviews). The framework has been tested by analyzing a real case, the Italian e-filing system Trial Online (TOL; in Italian Processo Civile Telematico - PCT). Through the analysis of the data gathered, we tested the parsimony and the applicability of the framework and we provided a (non-statistically significant) evaluation of the system.